CeeZee

by Mitchell Rycus

On August 12, 1952, in Detroit, Michigan CeeZee was born into a middle class, Jewish family. CeeZee, or Czar-Czar was the kind of a kid everyone liked. He had a quick smile, and such a likeable disposition that everybody who met him wanted the pleasure of hanging around with him. His real name was Alexander Ivan Petrov, names of two former Russian Czars, Alexander the liberator and Ivan the terrible; he wrongly thought he was named after them. He was called CeeZee by his siblings ever since he could remember, and it stuck with him.

It was only after he asked his mother why she named him after two Czars that he found out the truth. She told him he was named after two uncles and asked why he was so curious.

But it was more than curiosity. True, he was in some sense glad that he wasn’t named after Russian Czars, but by the same token it saddened him a little to find out that he lost an identity to two powerful men, even if one was evil and the other one was good. He felt that that was more like him—good, and evil. He knew that everyone liked the good guy, but that was because nobody knew the bad guy. Only he knew about him, the other side of CeeZee, the Ivan side.

29 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 20, 2024